


The First Match Struck

by crumbsfiction



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, mentions of blood and mild gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-11 13:10:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crumbsfiction/pseuds/crumbsfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a silly thought, ridiculous even, that they might survive. They might have graduated at the top of their class and they might have been called prodigies and even geniuses, but veterans still died on every expedition. </p><p>Staying alive has very little to do with skill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Match Struck

”How do you think you’re going to die?”

It long past midnight and Levi can’t sleep. He wasn’t, however, expecting Hanji to have the same problem and startles when her voice drifts form the bunk directly over his head.

“What?” 

“Do you think you’ll get eaten by a titan?” She’s whispering in a way that makes her voice even louder than her normal speaking voice and Levi rolls his eyes.

“Have you taken a look at your surroundings lately? We’re in the Survey Corps, asshat. Of course we’re going to be eaten by titans.”

Hanji ponders his words for a second, then her head appears over the edge of the bunk, barely visible in the sparse light the moon offers up through the window, outline of her face framed by a wild mess of hair.

Levi shifts on the bed. A spiral is making its way through the thin mattress and digs painfully into his lower back.

“Stop staring,” he says and pulls the itchy blanket up closer to his face.

“Do you think you die the minute you get eaten or are you left to boil to death in their stomachs? Or maybe the acid inside is too much and you erode to death?”

Levi pulls a face he knows she won’t see in the dark.

“Depends on how well you’re chewed, I suppose.”

Hanji seemingly ponders his words for a moment and hums in what he thinks is agreement.

“Why are you even asking me this? Go to sleep,” Levi hisses in a quiet whisper and Hanji’s head disappears.

“Okay,” she whispers back.

Levi shifts again. The metal spiral digs itself into the softer flesh of his side and he rolls over completely, facing the wall.

“They all say that we’ll die on our first mission.”

If it wasn’t for the uncharacteristic seriousness of her voice, Levi would groan and roll his eyes, but he can sense a hint of genuine fear mixed into her half-whispered half-shouted vowels, so he stays silent.

She takes a shaky breath and continues. “I don’t think we will. We’re going to survive, you and I. We’ll live until we get old and wrinkly and we’ll definitely see the ocean and the lands full of sand and ice. Right, Levi?”

It’s impossible to decide whether she’s serious or just needs some kind of reaffirming before they’re out there in front of the opening gates on what just might be their first and last trip outside the walls.

It’s a silly thought, ridiculous even, that they might survive. They might have graduated at the top of their class and they might have been called prodigies and even geniuses but veterans still died on every expedition.

Staying alive has very little to do with skill.

“Yeah,” he says, shifting for a final time on the gangly bed. “Yeah, of course.”

-

She kisses him for the first time in an empty hallway when they’re teenagers (because of course she’s the one to make the first move) and neither of them speak of it again.

-  
 

It’s their fifth expedition and she’s screaming, covered head to toe with blood, both the kind that evaporates and the one that doesn’t.

Levi can see her from the branch he’s perched on, a hurricane wielding metal blades, and the wind carries her voice through the forest as another titan meets is end.

He’s catching his breath, a short minute of sitting down after hours of swinging through he air and waving blades around.  He loves the 3DMG, he really does, the force of cold air against his face and the rush of adrenaline the speed brings, but his muscles are aching and his left knee hasn’t stopped shaking since that abnormal grabbed Peter mid air.

Hanji, on the other hand, hasn’t stopped to breathe once since the gate opened. He isn’t surprised though, she hasn’t slowed down since their first massacre of an expedition several months ago and today isn’t an exception. He pushes his bangs out of his face and watches as she swings toward him, the blade in her left hand snapped in half and the other in third.

There are no more spares hanging from her hips.

As he moves to stand a gunshot ring through the forest and the survivors are called to retreat and the gleeful expression on Hanji’s face quickly turns into a scowl as she makes her landing next to Levi.

“Already? I was just getting started,” she sighs and pulls her goggles off to wipe the blood from the smudged lenses. There’s a crack in one of them but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“You’re out of blades, stupid. It would rather be the titans who were going to get started,” he says, jabbing a finger into her shoulder, “on you.”

He gets a grin he doesn’t like in response. “I’d like to see them try.”

They head back in relative silence. Hanji seems to be deep in her own thoughts and so Levi takes a moment to listen to the few birds that are still out. Erwin barely throws them a glance when they’re back at the base, just asks for their kill counts an if they can help identify a few of the bodies that have been brought back.

Hanji report six kills with a wicked grin; Levi reports eight with a frown.

The deceased are lined up and wrapped in white sheets and just looking at the mere number of them makes him nauseous. “Those are only the ones they could bring back,” Hanji reminds him and he thanks her for the addition. They get to work.

There are a few of them he recognizes from training, even more so from the new recruits. Another wave of nausea hits when he looks to long at the coagulated blood and body fluids and missing limbs, but he pushes it down and juts down a name or rank on the papers provided by Erwin. The bodies are soon taken away, joisted up and piled on wooden carts together with a few wounded.

“What do you think?” Hanji asks as she appears by his side on silent feet. There’s dried blood on her face and he resists the urge to grab a handkerchief and wipe it off.

“Is that yours?” he asks back, gesturing to her face and he shrugs.

“Probably not. In any case, the adrenaline hasn’t gone down enough for me to feel any pain just yet.”  
 

Levi envies her. Every muscle in his body is sore and throbbing from overuse and there’s nothing he wants more than a hot bath to work out the kinks and knots in his back.

“Mike took out ten,” she tells him and he does a sort of half-assed shrug in response.

“Good for him.”

“Next time, I’ll take out ten at least,” she informs him. “Fucking monsters.”

Levi’s eye starts twitching.

“Okay.” He leaves her behind on the barren field to stew in her own rage for a while. It gets old quick once she gets started on her tirades, but he understands why she needs it. How it keeps her going, if though not completely sane.

Sometimes he wonders if it’ll consume her, if one day there’ll be nothing left but a shell of rage and hatred where Hanji had once been. It’s a dilemma without a solution. If she dropped what she was doing, she would definitely be consumed, but not by herself.

He leaves it alone.

-

She’s in his bed when he returns from the showers, back against the wall and legs tucked under the covers.

“Hi,” she says, voice surprisingly mellow for someone who returned from battle just a few short hours ago.

“Hi,” he says back. They’re both in their underwear, which he would have found amusing had the situation been different. They’d far lost more scouts than normal, the wagons filled to the brim with bodies dressed in white.

He’d lost count of the expeditions, hazy memories floating together into a hellish nightmare that came to visit every night when he tried to sleep.

“I had a thought today,” Hanji tells him, sticking out a slightly swollen foot from under the covers, wiggling her toes.

He ends up on the bed next to her, listening intently for what has to be hours as she gesticulates widely, theories and hypothesizes flowing from her mouth like liquid. She tells him about details he’s never thought about, but she’s apparently been picking up during their years in the Corps together. The proportional weight of their limbs, the exact size and depth of the weak point, how they always slow down in the shadows of the forest.

“I want to study them,” she tells him. “The approach I’ve had is so… overwhelming. I can’t keep it up,” she continues. “I hate them, I will probably always hate them, but we need to advance, to get the upper hand for once. And the only way we can do that is by learning about them. We could even capture live ones and study them on our own terms!”

She doesn’t ask for his opinion. She’s already made up her mind, a hint of defensiveness to her voice, as if she’s already built up counterarguments to shoot down anything he could say in opposition to her speech. She won’t change her mind.

He thinks it over.

“I think you should do it,” he tells her and the surprise is obvious on her face.

“Really?”

“Yeah. You know what you’re talking about. You’re damn intelligent, probably smarter than the entire Military Police put together-“

“That’s not a compliment, Levi. That’s just common sense.”

“Don’t interrupt,” he says and flicks her forehead. “You’re smart, you’re strong. You should do it, if that’s what you want.”

She smiles, the first absolutely genuine smile he’s seen on her face in weeks.

“I just have to get permission from Erwin first,” she sighs. “That’ll be the tricky part.”

The morning finds the official documents stamped, approved and ready on Hanji’s bed. Levi can hear her delighted squeal all the way to the stables.

-

He kisses her after a particularly terrible expedition when they’re curled up in each other’s arms and their own self-pity (because everything’s a mess and they’re all dead and he doesn’t know what to do) and neither of them speak of it again.

-

 When Wall Maria falls, it falls with a bloodbath of the likes even Levi’s wildest nightmares could never conjure up. Everywhere he looks, there’ a mangled body or a splatter of a blood and he’s getting dizzy trying to keep count of all the soldiers he’s seen meet their ends in the jaws of titans.  


He doesn’t know where Hanji is.  


Forcing his worst suspicions out of his mind, he checks his gas levels. The tank is barely half full, but it’ll have to do. The refill stations were wiped out hours ago anyway.  


Launching himself back into the air, he marvels at how convenient the gear is to use in a populated area and easily slings himself forward between the houses of the empty street. There’s a seven-meter class a few blocks over, but there’s team of three heading for it and they’re closer than he is. They’ll handle it fine.  


Minutes later, the team ends in a disgusting crunch of bones and a spray of red splattered across the tile roofs. Levi takes a deep breath and wills himself not to break down as the hopelessness of the situation settles somewhere just under his sternum.  


He doesn’t know where Hanji is.  


A beat, then the seven-meter class comes crashing down on the cobblestone street with an all to familiar whooping war cry and suddenly, Levi can breathe.  


“Where the hell have you been, four eyes?”  


Hanji makes an elegant landing at his left side. Her clothes are slightly torn and one of the straps on her goggles has snapped, but he can’t spot any injuries or blood that could belong to her.  


“Not lounging around doing nothing like you, short stack.”  


“Cram it. I bet I’ve taken down at least twice as many as you.”  


“Whatever you say,” she laughs. “Let’s get some shit done.”  


When Wall Maria falls, it earns them both a promotion each and Levi a nickname that he loathes instantly. Erwin replaces their old Commander and the frown lines on his forehead go permanent within a matter of weeks.  


The world, somehow, goes on.

- 

“Do you like me?” Hanji asks him on a Thursday afternoon and he gives her a look best described as disbelieving. She’s on the floor of his room with a book that’s probably heavier than her and Levi’s at his desk, filling up a neglected report that Erwin’s bugged him about for a week.  


“No, I just hang around with you every day because I’m incapable of making friends that aren’t crazy,” he replies in complete deadpan.  


“Well, I know that,” she says and Levi rolls his eyes, “but if I kissed you right now, would you throw me out of your room?”  


Levi’s train of thought comes to a spluttering halt.  


“What?”  


She moves quickly, standing up with a grace that’s somehow horribly ill fitting for her character but always there, and she’s staring him down.  


Hanji pokes him in the ribs.  


“Do you like me?”  


“You’re insane,” he tells her and turns back to his report.  


“You’re insaner,” she tells him and he bites back a remark about how that’s not a real word. “Quite the misfits, we are.”  


“Welcome to the Survey Corps,” he sighs.  


-  


Staying alive has very little to do with skill.  


It’s an hour before the new recruit’s first mission outside the walls, and he can see Eren shaking as he prepares his horse. Whether it’s from nerves of excitement, he can’t tell.  


_What a weird kid._   


“Hey, buttface,” Hanji calls out as she passes him on the courtyard, two boxes of flares in her arms.  


“What do you want?”  


“No need to get cranky on me, I’m just saying hi. Did you prep your horse already?”  


“I’m guessing you didn’t.”  


She laughs, the bright noise ringing through the morning air. “I’ll get to it, don’t worry.” Levi gives her his best unimpressed look, even though he knows it won’t affect her in the slightest.  


“Oh, will you look at that. Eren turned his back just now,” Hanji smiles and he hates the fact that she has to lean down to kiss him. “See you later,” she says and then she’s gone, heading to the supply carts with her flares.  


“Yeah, whatever.”  


Somehow, it’s all right.

**Author's Note:**

> and then levi's squad died and everyone was sad
> 
> title from "what death leaves behind" by los campesinos kinda.
> 
> ALSO headcanon that hanji makes the flares for the legion, like mixing chemicals to make the right colours


End file.
